PW: Viagra Falls: A Torrent of Books on a Potent Topic

Steven M. Zeitchik |

May 11, 1998

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Viagra Falls: A Torrent of Books on a Potent Topic
Steven M. Zeitchik -- 5/11/98
When the FDA announced last month it was sanctioning the impotency pill Viagra, it sent not just men into ecstasy but everyone at Simon &Schuster as well. That's because the house signed The Virility Solution by Dr. Steven Lamm and Gerald Secor Couzens last year but had been waiting months for the drug's FDA approval before printing it.
In March 1997, more than a year before the drug invaded mass consciousness, Lamm's agent Herb Katz approached S&S about a deal. Lamm, who in an earlier book touted the virtues of Phen-Fen, was a medical doctor involved in the clinical trials of a different impotency drug called Vasomax, and thought the potential appeal of both drugs would justify the financial risk of a book advance. "If the trials for either Vasomax or Viagra did not work out, then there could be no book," said Fred Hills, the book's editor. "But we agreed that the opportunity was so good that we should take a gamble."

A year later, S&S, along with many formerly frustrated men, learned that patience pays off. As soon as the FDA approved Viagra, S&S shipped the manuscript to the presses for a 40,000 first printing, and sold serial rights to New York's Daily News and Reader's Digest ("the unzipping of that magazine," in one wag's view). In-store author appearances, however, are unlikely, said one source at S&S, because men might be too embarrassed to turn out for them.

The little-blue-pill-that-could also has spawned a couple of mass market paperbacks that will hit stores in the coming months.

St. Martin's seems to have ingested a dose of Viagra itself with a voracious 250,000-copy first printing of Viagra: The Potency Promise by Larry Katzenstein ($5.50). "One of the advantages that I see to a mass market is that we can get it in bigger numbers to the drugstores," said Jennifer Weis, the book's editor. "It's about point-of-purchase. You buy the prescription drug and the book is right there." But while it's more difficult to place a hardcover at drugstores, "The strongest hardcover book-buying audience is usually 35 and older, also a large part of the market for the pill," Hills said.

Not to be left out, Pocket is planning a mass market paperback for June. Viagra: A Guide to the Phenomenal Potency-Promoting Drug by Susan Vaughan was acquired by senior editor Mitchell Ivers, who also acquired The Bald Truth, an earlier quick-turnaround mass market tied to another recently approved drug, hair-loss treatment Propecia.

And while an article in last week's New York Times ventured that there's "no rush to ride Viagra coattails" among book publishers, at least two others have other Viagra books in the works. Two weeks before the Viagra newsbreak, Berkley signed up the paperback Viagra and You by Dr. Mark Stolar, and plans a spring 1999 publication. HarperCollins executive editor David Hirshey made a pre-emptive six-figure bid for a hardcover humor book, Viagra Nation, by Esquire editor Lee Eisenberg and New Yorker cartoonist Bruce McCall, set for summer. But whether the book world can, er, sustain a lot of books on the wonder drug troubles even those who have committed to them. "The big question is whether men will buy a book about a condition as personal as this or whether they'll just buy the drug," Ivers said. But a year's supply of pills costs as much as $3285; the book only $23. And a book lasts longer.
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A version of this article appeared in the 05/11/1998 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: